NTA Deputy Director Uday Raj Regmi said they would ask the firms to present financial and technical proposals and then choose one of them to conduct the tests.“Since this is a programme carried over from the last fiscal year, we are waiting for the go-ahead from the Ministry of Information and Communications,” he added.
The annual plan submitted to the ministry for its okay has listed the performance test and a household opinion survey of wireless telecom services as one of the major tasks.The QoS survey will evaluate the services being provided by Nepal Telecom, Ncell and United Telecom in Kathmandu, Banepa, Birgunj, Dhangadhi, Butwal, Bhairahawa and other places in 11 districts.
NTA officials said that the plan to conduct QoS tests follows persistent criticism that the phone companies have not improved their service quality. In 2011, the government had conducted a QoS study in four major cities—Kathmandu, Pokhara, Biratnagar and Nepalgunj—by hiring an independent consultant.
The study showed that service quality had not improved compared to the findings of the test done in 2007.
In a follow-up to the poor test results, the NTA directed the phone companies last year to improve their QoS. Authority officials said that the study planned for the current fiscal year would help verify whether the companies had improved their services as they have claimed. According to NTA officials, the operators have been insisting that their services have become better even though customers continued to complain.
The new study is expected to be completed within three months after signing the contract with the consultant. The quality of telecom services has been a major issue in the telecom sector for a long time. However, the NTA has not been able to get the phone companies to improve their service.
“We will be creating a new regulation to govern the quality issue,” said Ananda Raj Khanal, acting chief of the NTA. He added that besides preparation of the new regulation, the NTA would also procure automatic drive test equipment to monitor the quality of mobile services.
The UN International Telecommunication Union had provided technical assistance to the NTA to formulate an effective QoS regulation due to its complicated nature.
No comments:
Post a Comment